Monthly Archives: January 2016

A publication by Brooke and Craig Jude in JMBE is focused on building microbial fuel cells (bacterially powered batteries) in the college and local school classroom! These microbial fuel cells serve as lab projects in Brooke Jude’s BIO145 Environmental Microbiology course and are also constructed when local 8th grade classes visit Bard through Center For Civic Engagement (CCE) sponsored events (that are taught by Bard students!)

Nsikan transferred to Bard from Bard College at Simon’s Rock after his sophomore year. In the summer of 2005, he did research on neuroendocrinology with Bruce S. McEwen of Rockefeller University. For his senior project, he did research on NMDA receptors in zebrafish. He was a research assistant in the Department of Pathology at Tufts Medical School studying Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease. In 2012, he obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia University for studies of drug treatments for stroke victims. He is now a medical reporter who specializes in infectious diseases and mental health. His writing has been featured in Medical Daily (International Business Times), Scientific American, Science nagazine, NatureNews, and The Scientist magazine.

The rise of antibiotic resistance found in microbial pathogens was driven by the use and misuse of antibiotics in modern medicine and agriculture. However, the extent to which antibiotic pollution impacted microbial communities found in soil and remote environments is unclear. Using a metagenomic approach to investigate microbes found in the Canadian high Arctic, Dr. Perron and colleagues found common microbial pathogens resistant to multiple antibiotics among these remote Arctic microbial communities. Dr. Perron’s team also showed that although antibiotic-resistant bacteria were also found in 5,000 years old permafrost soils, these bacteria did not show resistance profiles normally associated with infection.

Parris Humphrey ’06 transferred to Bard. In his junior year, he traveled to Kenya with Dr. Felicia Keesing to study why the sandflies that transmit leishmaniasis, a tropical disease, are more abundant in areas without large herbivores like giraffes, zebras, and elephants. For his senior project, he figured out that deer can clear blacklegged ticks of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. After graduation, he worked as a research assistant studying the molecular ecology of disease at the U. of Pennsylvania with Professor Dustin Brisson. As of early 2016 Parris is about to get a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, where he studies disease ecology and evolution.